Huffington Misses the Target, But She Hit the Tree

Paul Dunn tweeted about an piece posted on April 6 by Arianna Huffington in which she criticized the Obama Administration for its bank-centered approach to dealing with the current economic situation. In the article she analogizes the Administration’s banking solution with that of Ptolemy’s thinking about the Earth-centered universe, “like Ptolemy, they are really smart, they are really good at rationalizing.” The problem, of course, is that if your underlying theory is incorrect, any thinking you have done will lead to false conclusions.

While Huffington does a great job a destroying the Obama argument, she unfortunately proposes and equally faulty solution of her own, which is a variation on Keynesianism. To further her own analogy, she has replace the Earth-centered view of the universe with a Sun-centered one, but she concludes the sun is the center of the universe, i.e., all heavenly bodies revolve around the sun. She misses the fact that the sun itself revolves around the center of the Milky Way and that the Milky Way is one of billions of galaxies in a cosmos with no center.

The real solution to our current situation is to allow the entrepreneur a freer reign in an even freer market. Just like the cosmos there is no center per se. Whereas Huffington proposes a government-centered view of the universe to replace the bank-centered one. I suggest an open free moving cosmos in which entrepreneurs serve of the matter and energy, freely forming into heavenly bodies as the see fit. Some will be stars burning brightly, some planets, some comets – all influencing each other.

Like the cosmos, any attempts to organize must be self regulated and not insist on an anything-centered approach.